The Optics of Optimism: Justifying Evil after Bayle

Mara van der Lugt (University of St Andrews)

Friday, 6 April, 4 – 5.30 pm

Room 2.36, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place

Pierre Bayle’s discussion of the problem of evil in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique of 1696 triggered a wide variety of responses in the early eighteenth century. Among its many perceived threats was the question of Bayle’s philosophical pessimism: his confident assertion that the evils of life outweigh the goods, and that this was true in terms of both moral and physical evils.

This paper will discuss the continuation of this debate in authors such as Leibniz and King, who were united in their effort to turn the scales against Baylean pessimism and prove that the goods of life outweigh life’s evils. This effort led them into a tortured discussion of the most uncomfortable parts of any theodicy and the deepest domains of human suffering, culminating in the question whether it could be true for any person created by a good God that it would be better never to have been.

Mara van der Lugt is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews, pursuing a three-year project on pessimism and the problem of evil in the early Enlightenment. Following the completion of her doctorate (DPhil) in History at the University of Oxford in 2014, on the seventeenth-century French philosopher Pierre Bayle, she held a two-year fellowship at the Lichtenberg Kolleg – Institute of Advanced Studies in Göttingen (Germany). Before this, she completed a Master in Philosophy and a Research Master in Early Modern Intellectual History at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2010, focussing especially on questions of interpretation and dissimulation in early modern philosophers such as John Toland. Her book Bayle, Jurieu, and the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.

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